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Jauntful: An easy way to create and share personalized travel guides

Booking a holiday is one thing, but figuring out what to do when you get there is another thing altogether. Unless your sole goal is to sit on a beach supping sangria and munching melon, you’ll need a plan of action. Otherwise, you could end up wandering around the same gin joints without a clue as to what to do.

Jauntful, however, is a new Web app currently in stealth, designed to make it easier to share top travel tips with those planning on visiting your favorite ‘hoods. We took a quick peek to see what it does.

How it works

Once you’re set up with your account (you’ll need to request an invite at the moment, so you may not get in immediately), you’re presented with a blank slate. You enter the destination name (e.g. city), and begin adding your own points-of-interest.

For each attraction you add, you can include your own notes to personalize your recommendations.

Once you’ve compiled your list of must-see attractions, pubs, restaurants and all the rest, you can view everything plotted out on a map.

Jauntful taps GeoNames, a global geographical database of placenames, and Foursquare, to ensure that adding places is a cinch – based on our tests Jauntful’s arsenal of destinations is extensive and it never once failed to come up with the desired point-of-interest.

It also sidesteps Google Maps for MapBox instead, using data provided by OpenStreetMap. Though it does actually reel-in Google Maps for directions.

You can then share your travel guide with other Jauntful users, only your ‘friends’ on Jauntful or select individuals across email, Twitter and Facebook.

Though Jauntful isn’t quite open to everyone yet, if you’re accepted as an early user you can still share guides with anyone, regardless of whether they’re on Jauntful. For example, if you send an email to someone, they’ll receive a link that can be opened in a browser on their computer, and it can be viewed there or downloaded as a PDF and printed.

Jauntful is also optimized for mobile devices, and based on our initial tests it works pretty well though perhaps isn’t quite as fluid as you’d maybe expect from a native app.

So who exactly is Jauntful aimed at?

If you’re a traveler looking to get some ideas for what to do in a city, Jauntful might not be your first port-of-call. Not at the moment at least – over time when it develops more as a social network of sorts, you could ‘Request a Guide’ from other users who happen to live near where you’re about to venture.

There are missing features too. For example, it would be nice to have a ‘search’ function that lets you eke out existing guides for places you may wish to visit.

It does feel similar to Tripomatic in many ways, but this is a different service. While Tripomatic is about creating automated guides for places you yourself are visiting, Jauntful is more about sharing what you already know with others – it could be friends, overnight visitors, Airbnb guests (this is actually a very good use-case) and anyone else.

It is still very early days here though, and we’ll be keeping one eye on Jauntful to see where it goes from here. You can request an invite using the link below.